One Way or Another(16)

“And antique boilers that barely keep the place warm,” Martha said, laughing because it had always been that way. She remembered men standing by the fire after a dinner, lifting their coat tails to warm their backsides while the women, gorgeous in their sleeveless silk and jewels, fanned themselves as if too hot because to admit they were not would have been rude to their hostess, who was, in this memory of Martha’s, her grandmother.

Still, whatever its defects, Patrons Hall was home and always would be, and nothing, not the small flat in London’s Chelsea, nor her charming, cozy-in-winter-cooled-by-air-conditioning-in-summer Manhattan apartment would ever replace it in Martha’s heart.

Now she sighed: there was a new man on the scene who Martha would have to deal with. She’d probably have to extricate her sister from his clutches, at a time when she had so much personal stuff on her mind. Lucy was small, she was blond, she had Martha’s clear blue eyes inherited from their mother, and as far as men were concerned, absolutely no bloody sense. “Love” was what ruled Lucy, and she was about to become Martha’s responsibility. She guessed she had better call Marco and warn him.

First, though, she would get onto her friend at the jewelers about the chain with the initials, see if they might find to whom it had belonged. Like Marco, she had the feeling it might actually have belonged to the girl he claimed to have seen fall off the boat, never to be found. A shiver ran through her. She might be searching for someone dead.





13

Sometimes, Martha felt a long way from home, which, of course, she was. Even though she now officially called New York “home,” nothing could replace Patrons Hall, where she and her two sisters had been raised, like wild kids, she remembered with a reminiscent smile, allowed to roam on their ponies through fields and woods, jumping fences and falling off; somebody always seemed to have a broken limb with a grubby white plaster cast scrawled with silly messages written by friends.

Patrons Hall was built four hundred years ago. Though Marco referred to it laughingly as her “ancestral home,” it was the truth. The ancestor in question, one Horatio Patron, had started out as a stonecutter working the local quarry, graduating to building small cottages, eventually helping restore larger houses, learning his trade until finally he’d built his own home to his own design, which if truth were told, was decidedly eccentric.

Martha remembered winters there, the roaring fire in the nursery grate and old-fashioned Nanny, who, though she had a proper electric dryer in the laundry room, still liked to dry their clothes on the brass fender in front of the fire, causing it to smoke, as a result of which the children always smelled of applewood.

In fact, now, as she thought about the past, sitting in busy, bustling, towering Manhattan, its bumpy, cracked streets teeming with people intent on their lives, oblivious to those around them, Martha remembered her childhood home as full of friends, her parents’ friends and their own. She remembered the butler, who nowadays would have been called “the houseman.” Then, though, “butler” was a prestigious job to which a man might aspire. Besides, he had been with the family for forty years and was so much a part of it, they could never have done without him. His wife, known only as “the Mrs.,” was shorter than her husband, who was a very tall, very thin man with silver hair and a beak of a nose, and who Martha remembered as never smiling, though he was kind enough to the children, when he acknowledged their presence in “his” house, that is. The Mrs. barely made the five-foot-tall mark on the kitchen wall where the three children were measured annually, their height marked with a Biro. Of course, the butler himself was never measured, he kept his dignity at all times. They were an odd-looking couple, she in charge of housekeeping, overseeing the cook and the maids, always in her dark blue daytime dress, which was changed to black at five P.M. and never with an apron. The Mrs. was above all that. The fact was they were “family.”

They lived in a cottage near the gates, down a mile-long avenue bordered once upon a time with magnificent elms, later decimated by disease and felled to make way for hardier chestnuts, which now cast shade where needed and protected the old house from wind and storms. Martha loved the trees best when their branches were limned with the first winter snow, an event that often coincided with her and her sisters’ return from boarding school for the Christmas holiday. She remembered those trees at another time too, at a party, hung with scarlet Chinese lanterns for their parents’ wedding anniversary, throwing their glow across white linen cloths on the two dozen tables, when miracle of miracles and with what some called Patron luck, the English night was balmy, no rain fell, and all was calm and full of happiness.

How, Martha wondered now, sitting alone sipping her macchiato on a New York morning, could she ever find that again. It was part of her life, her background, her family. But times had changed; her parents were long gone, hopefully to what was called “a better place.” And with them went that way of life. Patrons Hall was still there, but there was no butler to ensure its upkeep, its “soul” as Martha liked to think of it.

The sisters often returned to their old home but there were no more times like the wedding anniversary dinner, at which the girls had been allowed to mingle with the grown-ups, and to choose what to wear, which resulted in the eldest sister in jeans and a Rolling Stones tongue T-shirt; the youngest in her mother’s strapless long red silk dress, hitched up with safety pins, and Martha in a short black velvet dress with a puffy skirt. Nobody warned her that a puffy skirt flipped up when you sat down and she still recalled the hot embarrassment of dropping onto a chair only to reveal her girly white cotton knickers to the entire room. She blushed even now, at the memory. She’d kept that dress, her first grown-up party dress; still had it sheathed in a plastic cover, though when she looked at its tiny waistline she marveled at how she ever fit into it.